Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.Waters, Clara Erskine Clement
History
Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D.
Waters, Clara Erskine Clement
Women artists -- Biography
Mme. Ronner has invented a method of posing cats that is ingenious and of
great advantage. To the uninitiated it would seem that one could only
take the portrait of a sleeping cat, so untiring are the little beasts in
their gymnastic performances. But Mme. Ronner, having studied them with
infinite patience, proceeded to arrange a glass box, in which, on a
comfortable cushion, she persuades her cats to assume the positions she
desires. This box is enclosed in a wire cage, and from the top of this
she hangs some cat attraction, upon which the creature bounds and shows
those wonderful antics that the artist has so marvellously reproduced in
her painting. Mme. Ronner has two favorite models, "Jem" and "Monmouth."
The last name is classical, since the cat of Mother Michel has been made
immortal.
Miss Winslow, in "Concerning Cats," says that "Mme. Ronner excels all
other cat painters, living or dead. She not only infuses a wonderful
degree of life into her little figures, but reproduces the shades of
expression, shifting and variable as the sands of the sea, as no other
artist of the brush has done. Asleep or awake, her cats look to the"
felinarian "like cats with whom he or she is familiar. Curiosity,
drowsiness, indifference, alertness, love, hate, anxiety, temper,
innocence, cunning, fear, confidence, mischief, earnestness, dignity,
helplessness--they are all in Mme. Ronner's cats' faces, just as we see
them in our own cats."
It is but a short time ago that Mme. Ronner was still painting in
Brussels, and had not only cats, but a splendid black dog and a cockatoo
to bear her company, while her son is devoted to her. Her house is large
and her grounds pleasant, and her fourscore years did not prevent her
painting several hours a day, and, like some other ladies of whom we
know, she was "eighty years young."
The editor of the _Magazine of Art_, M. H. Spielman, in an article on the
Royal Academy Exhibition, 1903, writes: "What the dog is to Mr. Riviere,
to Madame Ronner is the cat. With what unerring truth she records
delightful kittenly nature, the feline nobility of haughty indifference
to human approval or discontent, the subtlety of expression, and drawing
of heads and bodies, the exact quality and tone of the fur, the
expressive eloquence of the tail! With all her eighty years, Madame
Ronner's hand, vision, and sensibility have not diminished; only her
sobriety of color seems to have increased." Her pictures of this year
were called "The Ladybird" and "Coaxing." To the Exhibition of the
Beaux-Arts in Brussels, 1903, Mme. Ronner sent pictures of cats, full of
life and mischief.
<b>ROOSENBOOM, MARGARITE VOGEL.</b> Second-class medal, Munich, 1892. Born
in 1843 and died in 1896, near The Hague. She spent a large part of her
life near Utrecht, devoting herself mainly to the painting of flowers.
One of her works is in the Royal Museum at Amsterdam, and another in the
Museum at Breslau.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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